Lots of Christians are embarrassed by the Crusades, the series of military expeditions by western European Christians against Muslims (and on one occasion, eastern Christians) in the Middle East, in the name of reclaiming the Holy Land in the name of Jesus Christ. Most Christians these days dismiss them as but a momentary aberration, but they lasted from the final years of the 11th century, to the fall of Acre at the end of the 13th … so they can hardly be considered a single, discrete moment of collective Christian madness. Few Christians these days are capable of understanding what the Crusades were without waving them off as being “in the past,” and fewer still are willing even to talk about them very much.

While the subject of the Crusades makes Christians uncomfortable, it’s rare for them to explicitly and plainly lie about their nature. Yet that’s precisely what former Pennsylvania Senator and militant Christianist Rick Santorum did, however, as Politico explains (WebCite cached article):

Rick Santorum launched into a scathing attack on the left, charging during an appearance in South Carolina that the history of the Crusades has been corrupted by “the American left who hates Christendom.”

“The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical,” Santorum said in Spartanburg on Tuesday. “And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom.”

To say the Crusades were not an expression of Christian “aggression” is anti-factual and laughable. Of course they were! How could they not be? The massacre of Jerusalem in 1099 — to name just one event during the First Crusade — was most certainly “Christian aggression” — unnecessary, barbaric and horrifically excessive, at that. The list of other moments of “Christian aggression” that took place during the entire course of the long sequence of Crusades is long and bloody. For Santorum to deny their “aggression” means he’s either grossly ignorant of the Crusades, or a liar. (Or maybe both.)

Santorum’s idiotic diatribe included this revealing little snippet; referring to the concept of equality, Santorum said:

“It’s become part of our national religion, if you will,” he continued.

[…] actually standard Religious Right rhetoric. However, when one couples this piece of stupidity with his claim 10 months ago that the Crusades were not Christian “aggression,” you clearly have a man who’s blithely unconcerned with facts of any kind and unburdened by […]